THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 69S TATE
COUNSELOR
In the summer of 2016, I once again met with Suu Kyi in Naypyi-
daw. Now she was one of the officials occupying a cavernous gov-
ernment building, surrounded by the trappings of power. When
she became state counselor, the Obama administration urged her
to lay out a vision for the country. Instead, she largely retreated
into isolation in Naypyidaw. As one of her advisers told me, Suu
Kyi’s mind-set was: “People will judge us for what we do, not what
we say.” She launched a peace process modeled on her father’s
efforts to unite the ethnic groups—cease-fires that would lead
to negotiations and, ultimately, a federal system in which each
ethnic group had a formal degree of autonomy while still being
part of a national union. And she began efforts to reform Myan-
mar’s deeply dysfunctional economy, which had been set up on
a command- and-control basis so the military could guard its
resources and remain in power. While she’d long been in favor of
the U.S. maintaining some sanctions on Myanmar, she had come
to recognize that they had a crimping effect on the investment the
country needed to reform its economy. I told her that, with her
assent, the Obama admin istration would likely lift the sanctions.
When I said the administration was concerned that the
Burmese government’s treatment of the Rohingya was both ahumani tarian crisis and a threat to the country’s broader tran-
sition to democracy, she told me she was appointing a commis-
sion, led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to study
the issue and make recommendations. “I told Kofi that I wouldn’t
ask him to do this if I wasn’t serious about it,” she said. Sounding
like the idealistic Aung San Suu Kyi I’d long admired, she also said
she wanted to initiate a dialogue between Rohingya women and
Buddhist women in Rakhine State. Unlike most of the military
officials I’d met, she never referred to the Rohingya as Bengalis.
(Neither has she referred to them as “Rohingya” in public, how-
ever. She instead calls them “Muslims in Rakhine State.”)
As she walked me out of the building, she talked about her
workload and how she’d looked to the example of Margaret
Thatcher, who worked notoriously long hours at the center of a
male-dominated system. She also asked me about the upcoming
U.S. election. Hillary Clinton, I assured her, would continue to be
focused on Myanmar. “Yes,” she said with a somewhat scolding
tone. “But you don’t know who is going to win.”
By the time she visited Washington a few weeks later, in Sep-
tember 2016, the White House had decided to lift the sanctions.
During a breakfast at Vice President Joe Biden’s residence, she
made the case to congressional leaders that Myanmar “could
stand on our own.” Watching her, I saw deft political skill—sheYE AUNG THU/AFP/GETTY
Suu Kyi at a ceremony marking the 100th birthday of her father,
the hero of Burmese independence. February 13, 2015.